Pentagon Responds to Fox News' Taylor Swift Conspiracy Theory

After Fox News host Jesse Watters peddled the wild conspiracy theory that Taylor Swift is working for the United States Department of Defense, the Pentagon has denied that there is any truth to his assertion.

On Tuesday Watters suggested that the pop superstar could be "a front for a covert political agenda" during his eponymous show. To try and explain how Swift has become such a success, he told viewers that "around four years ago, the Pentagon's psychological operations unit floated turning Taylor Swift into an asset during a NATO meeting."

The anchor suggested the U.S. government recruited her as an agent used to convey selected information, such as propaganda to influence people's thinking and behavior. He then aired a clip that featured a woman supposedly from the Department of Defense talking about recruiting the singer as an "asset" to sway public opinion.

"Yeah, that's real. Pentagon's psyop unit pitched NATO on turning Taylor Swift into an asset," Watters said after the clip finished, adding that he worried about this because Swift endorsed President Joe Biden and encouraged her fans to vote in elections.

The singer has taken a more political stance in recent years and managed to drive record-breaking numbers to voter registration on Vote.org after she encouraged her Instagram followers to take action.

However, Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh has rubbished Watters' theory—and used the opportunity to ask Congress to grant the administration its supplemental budget request.

Singh referenced some of Swift's big hits by saying in a statement to Politico, "as for this conspiracy theory, we are going to shake it off."

She continued: "But that does highlight that we still need Congress to approve our supplemental budget request as Swift-ly as possible so we can be out of the woods with potential fiscal concerns."

Newsweek contacted Fox News and a representative for Taylor Swift for comment via email Friday.

What Watters either didn't know or failed to mention was the fact that the video he referenced came from a cyber security conference in 2019 that had been organized by NATO. The speech was not by a "Pentagon psyop unit" but Alicia Marie Bargar, who was then a research engineer at Johns Hopkins University.

Her presentation was titled "Challenges and Opportunities to Counter Information Operations Through Social Network Analysis and Theory." According to the conference's program, they were talking about the idea of using "social network analysis (SNA) to bolster the identification of false narratives used during information operations on social media."

Bargar talked about her studies on the propagation of false information on the internet, ranging from health conspiracies to ISIS, and how to identify and counter it.

Entertainment account PopBase shared the Pentagon's statement on X, formerly Twitter, and many took the opportunity to talk about the influence that Swift has.

"Government referencing Taylor Swift…oh she really does run the world," one person commented.

"I mean she's not from this world. She's a being from another dimension who was sent here to save and conquer the music industry," said another.

A third person added: "She has that much power that people think shes a government assett now? oh taygod [sic]."

Watters is no stranger to airing unconventional news content and went viral in early January when he invited a psychic on air to predict what 2024 had in store for Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

This also isn't the first time that the Pentagon has had a run-in with a Fox News host. In 2023, several anonymous officials said "good riddance" when Tucker Carlson departed the network.